Age of media mediocrity

One of Tony Abbott’s mantras is to return Australia to the glory days of the Howard government. Last Thursday the Channel Seven-Yahoo! news service took him seriously.

Under a timeline of January 5, 2012, 2.44pm, it reported that “Prime Minister John Howard has again warned the Solomon Islands and other troubled Pacific nations that they must lift their standards of governance if they want Australia’s help”. Providing succour to Abbott’s back-to-the-future policy, it said “Mr Howard made the comments after holding talks with his New Zealand counterpart, Helen Clark”.

Just as I was starting to feel relaxed and comfortable about the state of the nation, another news flash darted across my screen. At 2.46pm “Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer said he hoped fresh elections will be held in Fiji much sooner than is currently proposed. Mr Downer is set to raise the issue at biannual talks in Wellington”.

Those were the days: no boats, no deficits and no faceless men. Just Peter Costello waiting, with the patience of Prince Charles, for John Winston to fall off the twig. Now we know Howard is not only indestructible, but indefatigable. Some people thought they saw him watching the cricket last week at the SCG. According to Channel Seven, it must have been a Saddam-style body double. The real John Howard, resurrected as prime minister, was in New Zealand sorting out the problems of the South Pacific. Lazarus has had a triple bypass.

Since leaving Parliament I have not been a big consumer of news media. Rarely a day has passed, however, without my noticing significant errors.

While few have been as bizarre as the Howard howler, each has contributed to a pattern of incompetence. For standards of professionalism and reliability, the media is Australia’s most troubled institution.

This is evident in the findings of the 2010 Australian Election Study.

In its survey of public confidence, the press (19 per cent) and television (26 per cent) were regarded as the nation’s least trustworthy organisations, significantly behind universities (80 per cent), major Australian companies (55 per cent) and the political system (53 per cent). When journalists talk about distrust of politicians, the problem is mild compared with how they themselves are perceived.

A decade ago I was one of those naive MPs making speeches about the unlimited potential of the Information Age. As the public has been exposed to extra sources of information, it has actually become more cynical about news coverage. Quantity has not guaranteed quality. If anything, we have entered a Misinformation Age, an era of irrationality and distrust in public life.

Thus the scientific evidence underpinning climate change has been widely discredited, generating grassroots scepticism. Internationally, the prospects of progressive politics – which have always relied on the values of humanism and rational debate – have never been more dismal.

And so the problem worsens. In an age of irrationality, standards are readily dispensable. Most media outlets now regard errors and unethical behaviour as unavoidable byproducts of an increasingly competitive industry.

Journalists have become like members of the Australian cricket team: once selected it is nearly impossible to be sacked. We can be certain, for instance, that the person responsible for returning Howard to the prime ministership is still at his desk today, getting ready to break the big news of September 11, 2001, Gough Whitlam’s sacking and the Apollo moon landing.

His soul mate is Neil Breen, the editor of Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph, who in 2009 committed the mother of all howlers. On his front page he published fake photographs of a naked “Pauline Hanson” even though, by his own admission, he knew the story “had holes in it”. Despite a humiliating apology and defamation payout, Breen is still at his desk. This is typical of the cowboy culture of Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd, in which mistakes are ignored and invasions of privacy are rationalised as the public’s “right to know”.

Finally, a delicious endnote. On December 28 in The Australian newspaper, George Megalogenis wrote about the Australian Election Study research on institutional confidence.

His article and accompanying graphic, however, contained errors – in one case, directly contradicting itself (mixing up the numbers for banks and financial institutions). In reporting that the media cannot be trusted, Megalogenis could not be trusted to get the facts right. Knowing News Ltd, he’ll be an editor one day.

Mark Latham is a former federal Labor leader.

The Australian Financial Review

BY Mark Latham

Former ALP leader Mark Latham pulls no punches as he
scrutinises the Australian political landscape and the Labor Party's
fortunes.